The present invention relates to the art of computers and, more particularly, to validation of computer interconnects.
Certain computers, such as supercomputers, include massively parallel clusters of computation nodes interconnected by a high bandwidth fiber optic network. Current and next generation supercomputers are enormous in scale and may include up to, for example, a half-million processors housed in over 2,000 drawers that fill close to 200 equipment racks which are interconnected by as many as a half-million fiber-optic cables. Such a supercomputer has a footprint that is equivalent to half a football field. This unprecedented scale gives rise to a serious problem, namely how to correctly physically cable such a machine in a reasonable time period. Identifying and correcting cable errors is problematic, especially for cables that interconnect opposite ends of the supercomputer. Additionally, when nodes are moved, deleted, added or changed, time is lost in re-cabling and correcting cabling errors.